The Brody Taylor Series

The Brody Taylor Series comprises fiction thriillers featuring Brody Taylor, a professional social engineer, someone who is an expert in technologically and psychologically influencing people into taking actions that may not be in their best interest. If you love ingenious thrillers with unexpected twists that are packed with technology and great characters, read The Brody Taylor Series now.

Social Engineer

The first installment in the series is a novella called Social Engineer that introduces Brody Taylor. A pharmaceutical company is under cyberattack from China. The chemical formula for their Alzheimer’s drug at stake. Can Brody fortify their cyber-defences before it’s too late. But can a hacker ever be trusted?

 

Invasion of Privacy

The first full-length novel in the series is called Invasion of Privacy. When a beautiful young cellist is found brutally murdered, expert security consultant Brody and police detective Jenny team up to track down the serial killer responsible. The answer lies in an illegal voyeuristic website impervious to Brody’s considerable hacking talents.

 

Is the Deep Web real?

Brody Taylor’s online activities take place in the ‘Deep Web’, which, unfortunately is a real online phenomenon. Also known as ‘Deepnet’ and the ‘Hidden Web’, it hides beneath the ‘Surface Web’ and is not indexed by standard search engines. Because the Deep Web is not indexed, you have to know how to get in. Much of it can only be accessed by using special software such as Tor, which allows users to access websites, surface or deep, anonymously. And if you’re in the Deep Web you definitely want to remain anonymous.

And once inside, what can you find? Well almost anything illegal. Down there are many criminal black markets. This article in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper paints a disturbing picture. It shows how you can access the Deep Web to hire hitmen, purchase drugs, access child pornography and take part in every other illicit activity you can think of. It’s also the place where black hat computer hackers hang out, sharing and selling their exploit kits to other hackers or script kiddies. And thanks to untraceable cyber-currencies like Bitcoin, it’s even easy to trade without being traced back to your real-world identity by law enforcement agencies.

But as dark and dangerous as the Deep Web is, it really makes a wonderful backdrop on which I base my contemporary cyber-crime thrillers. Brody, the elite computer hacker protagonist of the Deep Web Thriller Series, accesses the Deep Web in order to make contact with other hackers, obtain new exploit capabilities or, in my planned sequels, to track down the really bad guys trading anonymously through the Deep Web.